tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post116371114510199609..comments2015-03-30T16:51:29.695-04:00Comments on In the Middle: 101 Uses for a Dead DeerJeffrey Cohenhttps://plus.google.com/110433684739546897626noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-53373540449333180892007-03-22T00:06:00.000-04:002007-03-22T00:06:00.000-04:00Just a little clarification, the case above that i...Just a little clarification, the case above that is referenced as having occured in Duluth actually occured in neighboring Superior, Wisconsin. Hathaway is currently sentenced to probation and rehabilitation at the Institute for Psychological and Sexual Health, which is located across the bay from Superior in Duluth, Minnesota. As a Duluth resident, personally I am relieved that acts committed by Mr Hathaway did not occur on our side of the bridge, and I take pride in the fact that Duluth is equipped to offer Hathaway some apparently much needed rehabilitation.Gene Sparks, Duluth, Minn.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1164128113890686252006-11-21T11:55:00.000-05:002006-11-21T11:55:00.000-05:00I'll start with my hesitance about generation, if ...I'll start with my hesitance about generation, if generation is understood as reproduction: thinking sex reproductively is heteronormative (I'm thinking of Carolyn Dinshaw's reading of Chaucer's General Prologue in <I>Getting Medieval,</I> 117-21).<BR/><BR/>That said, the corpse is, as you point out, generative. What I think it "generates" is its own constitutive parts, heretofore held together and kept hidden by an imaginative force of desire for a self-same identity. The corpse, then, might be thought the truth of the body. In other words, I locate the problems of the corpse, not in the rotten body, but in the living body itself and what it must disavow in order to be produced as the site of a self. <BR/><BR/>In my perverse or playful or whatever attention to the living body as "really" a corpse (one of my tattoos simply says "dead flesh"), I'm thinking, too, of these points:<BR/><BR/>"So the word "fetish" fetishizes itself, in the same manner as do other words that speak of the false, the phony, the tawdry, the lustrous, the artful, and of course the simulacrum of art" (6).<BR/><BR/>"Behind the unveiled secret, another more convoluted secret cloaks itself—-one that perhaps will never be revealed absolutely: it is that of presence in general, which might never be exempt of fetishism." (6).<BR/><BR/>"The fetish is better named than it appears. It is an artifice, a fact, something made: it is produced. It is the production of desire according to the double genitive: produced by desire and producing desire, namely, the desire of presence." (7)<BR/><BR/>Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Two Secrets of the Fetish," <I>Diactritics</I> 31 (2001): 3-8 (trans. T. C. Platt).<BR/><BR/>That said, once we start thinking of the sacred dismembered corpse--whether of saints or secular magnates--we have to go at these problems, probably, in a different way, since these bodies seem to acquire more power, <I>more</I> presence, the more widely they are scattered. One might even think of exemplary punishments, too, of bodies quartered and displayed through the realm--a particularly early modern punishment?--and the way this display is a spectacle, not so much of the dismembered body, or the body paradoxically made more potent through being scattered, but of power of Law to remake bodies into whatever form it likes. And this brings me back to the ritual in Tristan, in which the dismembered deer is a <I>better</I> deer than the living deer. The upshot of all this musing is to observe (not point out, since I'm sure you're aware of all this), the multiple ways to understand corpses, dissolution, and dismemberment.Karl Steelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12848215331692228040noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1164118521340571752006-11-21T09:15:00.000-05:002006-11-21T09:15:00.000-05:00Thanks for reading my entry! The "generative" par...Thanks for reading my entry! The "generative" part of both generative anxiety and the generative corpse comes in part from Zimmerman. The thesis (influenced in Zimmerman by Georges Bataille and Julie Kristeva) is this: one of the things that is horrifying, that produces taboos about corpses, is that they confuse life with death, right? They are like the living person, but they are also like death. In a way, they seem almost to be giving birth to death -- if you imagine putrefaction, the body will "breed" maggots, and will not just crumble into dust, but break into pieces -- a kind of multiplying even as it decomposes. <BR/><BR/>Corpses also leak fluids through their orifices in a way that is troublingly like the processes of the living body -- especially the female body. And since, for Zimmerman, the focus of Renaissance interest is even more <I>female</I> corpses than just corpses, she maintains that the image of the female corpse always provokes an identification with the living woman's potential generative powers. <BR/><BR/>The argument also hinges on seeing any sexual act as potentially generative, or at least alluding, in a way, to reproduction. (Of course, literally, this is not true at all, but for the purpose of the theory it's supposed to be always lurking in the background.) Thus, part of the problem with corpses as idols as the same as just the problem of idols by themselves – worshipping an idol gives agency to a "dead" thing, a thing that doesn't really have any power to grant or deny, make or destroy. Another way to look at commodity fetishism is to speak about commodity idolatry, especially in the Renaissance. (That's David Hawkes's thesis in <I>Idols of the Marketplace</I>.)<BR/><BR/>As for generative anxieties – I guess I’m thinking of it like grit making a pearl. The anxiety surrounding corpses is the grit and a play that features a corpse (or noticeably fails to feature a corpse) is the pearl. That goes for anxieties allayed (or produced and then allayed) by <I>American Idol</I> too. Hopefully. Man. That's long, reductive and confusing. I hope I can make it better in the actual paper!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1163956229316721892006-11-19T12:10:00.000-05:002006-11-19T12:10:00.000-05:00I suppose I should have titled the piece 3 uses fo...I suppose I should have titled the piece <I>3</I> uses for a dead deer (but the allusion, which I'm sure everyone caught, was to that 101 Uses for a Dead Cat book that was such a sensation, at least among kids, in the late 70s/early 80s).<BR/><BR/>--<BR/><I>only here we see the complicated mess that occurs when a judicial structure is faced with its own inconsistencies and lacunae</I><BR/><BR/>Yes. I also think that what we have with the 13th-century carrion law is a case of inexclusion: the exception has been folded into the law. Does the escape from power, now marked as a violation, bring the lacuna into the law with it? Inevitably, yes, because "managing the panic" of the illicitly killed high-status animal at the same time marks the death as an occasion for panic. In other words, having to manage the carcass creates the carcass <I>as crisis.</I> It's no wonder, then, that poaching was thought a species of insurrection, both by the elites and by hoi polloi (at least in later medieval and post-medieval England).* I think of potty-mouthed children whose parents overreact, and the children, masochistically anxious for attention or just sadistic, return to cursing just to get their parents' goat(s). <BR/><BR/>*Here's a bit from my notes to I. M. W. Harvey "Poaching and Sedition in Fifteenth-Century England," in Ralph Evans, ed. <I>Lordship and Learning: studies in memory of Trevor Aston.</I> 2004. 169-82:<BR/><BR/>Notes the way that poaching and protest assumed similar forms in SE England (175). False names: "during the second decade of the fifteenth century a Sussex chaplain under the assumed name of Friar Tuck led a poaching gang which made itself notorious for taking venison and burning foresters' houses in Surrey and Sussex" (175). Eastern Kent Thomas Cheyne went by name of Hermit Bluebeard, and his captains named King of the Fairies, Queen of the Fairies (!), and Robin Hood (175).<BR/>===============<BR/>EJ<BR/><I>The story then, ultimately devolves to the issue, not of animal integrity, or of how human elites have power over determining an animal's worth or lack thereof [moral, spiritual, or otherwise], but rather, to the issue of what sexual acts a human being is or is not allowed to perform.</I><BR/><BR/>I agree. I add that what fascinates me so much about the necrobestiality is that Hathaway's act becomes a way to recognize the way carcasses are not <I>quite</I> dead. Necrobestiality, because it is a crime, necessitates a taxonomic effort that unravels certainties about the distinction between the living and the dead, about the ontologic (or at least symbolic) status of a carcass, about what counts as an animal, and so forth. If I wanted to condemn myself to the career path of the dirty minded, the Hathaway case could be folded into a discussion of the weird attention to "skull fucking" in pop culture over, say, the past 10-15 years. But no way am I going there. All I want to say, following you EJ, is to point out the perhaps unique, shocking force of sexuality to clarify or muddle things. <BR/><BR/>If I had to decide, <I>right now,</I> on my third book project (first: animals; second: meat?), I do something with corpses, beginning with Augustine's <A HREF="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/augustine-onthecareofthgedeadnpnf1-03-39.html" REL="nofollow">On the Care for the Dead,</A> going into the undead stories found in, say, Geoffrey of Auxerre's <I>On the Apocalypse,*</I> going into the Cosmas and Damien story, and, of course, dead animals.<BR/><BR/>* from my notes on the Joseph Gibbons trans.:<BR/><BR/>In Tripoli, a child dies who had been ordained as a cleric, and his uncle, consumed with grief, gives the boy over to an old woman: "No one knows what she said or did, but subsequent events proved that she cut the skin of his arm, and in the little opening she inserted certain written marks." (163). Boy enters the choir, but after a while, another clergyman hears the boy singing and says, " 'I hear the voice not of a living man but of one already dead'" (164). He decides to prove that this is a soulless body: "…he set the naked boy on a rug and carefully felt his body in their presence. Under the skin of the arm he felt the little piece of paper which the wicked old woman had inserted. Without delay he opened the skin and took out the paper. Skin and flesh turned immediately to powder, and the bones fell apart from one another in a heap. Thus he showed that this was only a fantasy life that fooled onlookers, and that the boy was dead while he seemed to be alive" (164).Karl Steelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12848215331692228040noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1163889191950281432006-11-18T17:33:00.000-05:002006-11-18T17:33:00.000-05:00Just to clarify earlier comment: the fact that the...Just to clarify earlier comment: the fact that the deer, in the Duluth case, might have some kind of post-mortem integrity that could be violated sexually, but at the same time, while alive is available--legally--to be killed, makes absolutely no sense, unless you realize that where sexuality is concerned, in the law, but also within more generalized social mores, the usual rules almost never apply.Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03205471011527344127noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1163877926933936252006-11-18T14:25:00.000-05:002006-11-18T14:25:00.000-05:00Karl--I am in the midst of finishing my annual "ye...Karl--I am in the midst of finishing my annual "year's work in old english studies" review and therefore can't say much here [yet], but the one thing that jumps out at me immediately in the case in Duluth has to do with how sexuality always trumps violence in our society, at least, as a subject that tends to upset everyone [especially those in power]. I mean, the upshot here is that the status of the deer's integrity [really, its spiritual integrity, if you wany to get right down to it] is only a legal issue insofar as determining its sexual "violation" is concerned. Brian James Hathaway could have done almost anything else to that deer [dismember it, eat it, etc.] without fear of being questioned about it. The story then, ultimately devolves to the issue, not of animal integrity, or of how human elites have power over determining an animal's worth or lack thereof [moral, spiritual, or otherwise], but rather, to the issue of what sexual acts a human being is or is not allowed to perform. You, of course, have already adequately detailed the moral hypocrisies involved.Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03205471011527344127noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1163773283892464342006-11-17T09:21:00.000-05:002006-11-17T09:21:00.000-05:00Structurations of power, necrobestiality, carrion,...Structurations of power, necrobestiality, carrion, lepers, the pleasures (in so many senses of that word) of Duluth ... there is more crammed into this post than I can wrap my tiny brain around. <BR/><BR/>Briefly, though, it seems to me that the <EM>tension</EM> animating the examples is between what people actually do (eat carrion from proscribed places, feast on human corpses or body parts, have sex with venison) and what certain Powers That Be (not All Power in General, but certain local and historical structures of governance and control) want to prevent, disallow, punish. Really, what we gimpse in all the examples is the age old struggle between rogue desires and communtities that police their own borders by disallowing such desires ... only here we see the complicated mess that occurs when a judicial structure is faced with its own inconsistencies and lacunae.<BR/><BR/>Could I say that more clearly? Power structures tend to be <EM>ad hoc</EM> and messy networks in search of tidiness and efficiency; it isn't hard to send them into a tizzy (just put one node of that system face to face with something it hadn't yet made impossible but seems it ought to have, like eating dead deer in an aristocratic preserve or having coitus with a deceased Bambi). Outcome: a regulative convulsion that aims to be universal and final, but ends up being a local and temporary patch, better at soothing some agitatation than actually preventing more rogue desires from blooming and being enacted.<BR/><BR/>So that's my long way of wondering if mandating that dead deer be eaten (and thereby, as you brillinatly suggest, sufficiently degraded into uselessness) via the mouths of lepers actually gets carried out, and if so does it really alleviate the panic over exerting elite power over "their" dead that the body of the deer in the forest seems to have engendered?J J Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com